A dad posted this on Reddit, in a thread about whether he has to stick with his kid for the next decade. He writes: "So my 5 year old finally found his click in Judo (plus the sensei is really great with kids) after many many attempts at other sports/gymnastics stuff."
"My question is for the last 4 months twice a week, I been driving and staying at the dojo for 1-1.5 hours (so he can hang with his buddies). In my head do I really need to do this for the next 10+ years?"
He goes on: "What do I do while I wait? I figure I can only be on my phone for so long. Half the time Im just staring into space".
Nothing in that post is a complaint about the school. The sensei is really great with kids, in his own words. He's doing the arithmetic on a decade of sitting in a car park, and the classes are what sits on the other side of the sum. One reply told him not to worry, because the kid "will probably want to drop out, when he will get old enough that he doesn't need you to drive him anymore". Another just asked, "Wait, why can't you just leave and pick him up at the end of class?"
Read his post as the owner. We tell owners the after school programme is the one product that answers him. The child is collected, so there is no second drive and no 1-1.5 hours of staring into space. That is the one thing your school sells where what the parent is buying is a time of day, which is why running it off your kids' beginner ad doesn't work.
How do you market an after school martial arts program?
By answering a logistics question before you answer anything else.
Your normal kids' ad is written to a parent who knows she has a problem but has no idea that you are the answer to it. She knows her son is getting walked over at school. She isn't searching for martial arts, because it hasn't occurred to her that a martial arts school is what fixes that. Most of the work the ad does is joining those two things up.
The after school parent is nothing like that. She knows exactly what she wants, which is somebody responsible to have her child from the final bell until she can get there. She isn't thinking about confidence and focus. She's thinking about whether you can be at Lincoln Elementary when it lets out.
So the ad's first job isn't to interest her. It is to let her rule you in or out without having to work at it. A confused mind doesn't buy, and nothing confuses this parent faster than a beautiful ad about discipline and respect that never says which schools you collect from.
The character development isn't wasted. It's what makes her stay once she's in, and it's what she tells her sister about at Christmas. It's just not what gets her to click in October.
The five facts a normal class ad never has to carry
Put these in the ad, and again on the page where she gives you her details.
The schools you collect from, by name. This is the highest-value line you will write all year. A parent scanning a feed does not translate "serving the north side" into "my child's school". She does translate "Lincoln, Cherry Hill and St Anne's".
The time you collect. Not "after school". The actual bell, for each school.
What happens between pickup and home time. Training, obviously, but she is also quietly asking whether homework gets done, whether there is food, and what the rest of it looks like. Say it plainly.
Early closing days and in-service days. If you cover them, say so in the ad. If you don't cover them, say that too, because finding out in January is how you lose her.
Your own area name. Same rule as every other campaign you run: the area name goes in the copy and on the booking page, so nobody books who was never going to come. The rest of that argument is in how far around your school to advertise.
One honest caution. We write ads about changes a parent will see in weeks, and we mean it, but only where the classes genuinely deliver that. The same rule applies harder here. Don't advertise a pickup you can't make. A class that disappoints loses a student. A pickup you miss loses the student, the sibling, and a review that names your school.
How far should you drive to pick up students?
This is where the usual radius advice inverts, and it's the part most owners get wrong.
For a normal campaign we set the targeting by population rather than by miles, because population density tells you how far families will really travel. That logic holds because the family does the driving. They decide what's too far.
For the after school programme, you do the driving. The constraint isn't how far a parent will travel. It's how many schools one vehicle and one instructor can physically reach between the first bell and the last. Your catchment is a list, and the list has a length.
So the number you need isn't a radius. It's the drive time from each school gate to your mat, measured on a weekday afternoon, in traffic, on the route you would really take. Not on a Sunday morning. Then the finish times, which differ by school and sometimes by grade, and which decide whether two schools can share a run or need two.
Distance still bites, just somewhere else. Long drives and heavy traffic are a reliable cause of quitting, and in a pickup programme the drive sits on your side of the ledger, every afternoon, in term time, for years. A school that adds twenty-five minutes to the run isn't a marketing decision. It's a staffing decision you'll be living with in February.
What time should the programme run?
The schools decide, and that's a real break from how we'd normally answer this.
When we look at booking data across all of our schools, evening trial classes cluster hard around particular weekdays and particular times, and those findings, set out in the best class times for trial bookings, run your beginner timetable. They tell you nothing about the afternoon, because nobody is choosing the afternoon. The bell chose it.
What that means in practice is that your slot is fixed and your capacity isn't. The programme runs when the schools finish. The lever you control is how many children you can collect and supervise on your worst day of the year rather than your best one, and that number is what you advertise.
Keep the programme separate from your evening timetable in your own head, too. A child in the after school programme is in a different product from a child whose mum drives them to the beginners class. That means a different ad, a different page and a different enquiry form. On where the rest of the ad budget goes, which age group should your ads target is the fuller answer.
How do you get students for an after school program?
Change what the enquiry has to tell you before anybody picks a date.
On a normal booking you want the child's name and age, so you know they fit the class, and you want the parent to have clearly seen where the school is before she hands over her details. Age and location. That is the qualification.
Here there's a third thing, and it matters more than either of them: which school does the child attend? A seven-year-old from a school you don't collect from isn't a lead with a small problem. There is no version of that booking that works. Ask it on the form, before the time slot, alongside name, mobile and email.
The rest of the booking discipline carries over unchanged. Don't let anyone book a long way ahead, because no-shows climb the further out the date sits. Make sure she knows where you are. Get the contact details before she chooses a day, not after.
The after school sheet. Build this before you write a single ad
One row per school. Five columns:
School name, exactly as a parent would write it.
Exact finish time. Check it, and don't assume it matches the school down the road.
Door-to-door minutes from that gate to your mat, driven on a weekday afternoon.
Can it share a run with another school on the list? Yes or no.
Seats you could take from that school on your worst week.
Then add two questions to your booking form, above the calendar:
"Which school does your child attend?" (drop-down, only the schools on your sheet, plus "another school")
"What time does their school finish?"
And the ad line, built from the sheet: "We collect from [schools] at [times], train, and have them ready for you at [time]. [Your area]."
The last column is the one that matters. Write the honest number, not the ambitious one, and advertise that. Running out of places is a conversation. Standing a parent up at a school gate isn't.
Who is the easiest adult student in your town?
The one standing in your car park at the end of every weekday.
We tell owners to point their paid advertising at children, and the reason isn't that adults don't matter. It is that children arrive with an adult attached, the show rate is almost always higher, and once that adult is through your door you can make them an offer too. The after school programme is that argument at its strongest, because that adult is through your door every weekday.
So have something ready. When the child enrols, offer the parent a genuinely strong trial of your adult classes, a fortnight or even a free month, with a deadline on it, or she'll mean to and never will. Then enrol her properly on her own first class, the same way you would enrol anyone, rather than letting the free weeks quietly run out. If she starts training it isn't just an extra membership: it makes the child far more likely to stay, because now it's a family thing rather than a drop-off. There is a whole page on that one: how to sign the parents in your lobby.
The enrolment conversation for the child doesn't change either. Try to enrol on the first day, while the excitement is at its peak, with an extra you add on the day that builds on whatever offer she came in with rather than swapping it for something else. Fold the free weeks into the first month and put a uniform or a waived registration fee on top. The day one enrolment offer has it step by step.
One thing we won't give you is advice on licensing, insurance or safeguarding for transporting children. We've no business having an opinion on it. Get that from somebody who does, before the first pickup rather than after.
The student you keep by accident
A mother in a parenting thread wrote this about her six-year-old: "My 6 year old did karate for the past 10 months and just can't handle the full school days beginning again and the karate twice per week." She pulled her daughter out and moved her to rock climbing, once a week, which the child chose herself.
Read that as the owner. Ten months in, and the reason she gives is the full school days beginning again. Karate was the second thing in a day that had already filled up, and she moved her daughter to a once-a-week activity the child picked herself.
An after school place is the same training without the part she gives as her reason. It sits inside the school day's own hours rather than on top of them, so the evening goes back to the family. You can't fix a child who can't handle full school days and karate twice per week. You can stop asking them to do both.
Where we sit in this
We're a marketing company, so take this knowing we'd like the work.
We find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them. That split doesn't change for an after school programme. What changes is the qualifying, because a booking from the wrong school is worth nothing to either of us, and that question has to sit in the funnel rather than get discovered on the phone.
We're paid when a student walks in. No retainer, no contract. So a programme with only a handful of places doesn't frighten us. We'd rather fill those and have you ask us to pause than fill forty you can't collect. If you want the shape of how we charge, read how pay per show works.
The thing to do Monday
Write the list.
Every school you could realistically collect from, with its exact finish time next to it. Phone the offices if you don't know. That list is your catchment, it's your capacity, and the names on it are the most valuable words that will go in your ad.
Then count the last column and see what you've actually got. If it's more places than you can fill from your own families, book fifteen minutes and bring the sheet. If we don't think we can fill those places from those schools, we'll tell you on the call.
Questions owners ask
What should an after school program ad say?
Five things a normal class ad never has to carry: the schools you collect from by name, the time you collect, what the children do between pickup and home time, what happens on an early closing or in-service day, and your own area name. A parent reading it should be able to work out in about four seconds whether this solves her week. Everything else is secondary.
What makes a good afterschool program?
From the owner's side, one you can staff on your worst week rather than your best. Pickup is a promise with a clock on it, so the programme has to survive a sick instructor and a van that will not start. Decide how many children you can collect and supervise on a bad day, advertise that number, and stop there. A waiting list is a better problem than a parent standing in a school yard wondering where you are.
How do you start an after school martial arts program?
Start with the list, not the launch. Write down every school within a sensible drive, its exact finish time, and how long the run takes on a weekday afternoon rather than on a quiet Sunday. Two or three schools whose finish times you can actually cover is a programme. Six you can nearly cover is a problem. Then tell the families already on your mat before you tell anybody else.
How do you start an after school martial arts program with no money?
The first intake usually comes out of your existing families and one phone call to each school office, because the children are already yours and their parents already trust you. That gets you running and gives you something true to advertise. Once places are filling and you know the numbers hold up, ads are what put the programme in front of the parents in those same schools who have never heard of you.